Doctorow, Cory. Little Brother. Cory Doctorow's Craphound.com. Web. 3 May 2011.
Purpose
The book, Little Brother by Cory Doctorow presents several challenging ideas related to security and privacy in a post-9/11 world that thrives on technological development. Your essay will demonstrate how well you articulate and support your own position of the issues related to intellectual freedom that Doctorow presents.
Task
After reading Little Brother, answer each of the questions below in a 5-8 page, double-spaced, essay:
How might Marcus describe his intellectual freedom rights regarding being “surveyed” and his right to circumvent the efforts of the surveyors? How might he describe how reprogramming RFIDs reflects intellectual freedom?
How does Doctorow depict Marcus’s mother and father as representing different perspectives about the government’s oversight of individuals? Which parent’s perspective do you identify with most? Why?
Was there a point in this book at which you felt Marcus had “crossed the line” in terms of his resistance efforts? If so, what was that point and why do you think he went too far? If not, why do you feel he was justified in his actions?
What insights did you gain about intellectual freedom from reading this novel? What questions do you have after reading this novel?
Steal this Wiki: inspired by Abbie Hoffman's Steal This Book that the main character uses, actually exists as a open source project that predates the novel : http://wiki.stealthiswiki.org/wiki/Main_Page
Bernick, Philip, Rhonda Steele, and Galen Bernick. "Interview With Cory Doctorow About Little Brother." Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 53.5 (2010): 434-439. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 3 May 2011.
Doyle, Genevieve, Henry Johnston, and Cory Doctorow. "Review of Cory Doctorow's Little Brother" Surveillance & Society [Online], 7 6 Jul 2010. Web. 3 May 2011.
via Google Scholar: "Since this special issue interrogates the role of surveillance in childhood, we thought it was important to hear from some young people. We asked Genevieve Doyle and Henry Johnston, two Canadian teenagers, to review Little Brother, a science fiction novel that tells the story of how seventeen-year-old Marcus, a.k.a “w1n5t0n” uses his hacking skills to challenge anti-terrorism surveillance. Genevieve and Henry decided to write their review as an email conversation. The novel’s author, Cory Doctorow, kindly agreed to read their comments, and suggest ways to carry on the conversation."
NOTES
Bernick, Philip, Rhonda Steele, and Galen Bernick. "Interview With Cory Doctorow About Little Brother." Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 53.5 (2010): 434-439. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 3 May 2011.
"In some sense, [Little Brother] is kind of an old-fashioned book because it assumes that the reader would love to have explicit information about some of the secret stuff going on that explains how the world works and how we got to where we are. You can’t find this out just by interrogating reality. You can’t f \ind it out by just looking really hard at stuff. You have to know some basic stuff to even know which questions to ask Google to f ind out more. Things like, “Why is it you can buy stuff from Amazon without getting ripped off?” or “What does that little key at the bottom of your browser mean?” or “What does it mean if the NSA wiretaps the entire country? How does all this stuff work?” And most importantly, “What is the probability of risk and how do you gauge the probability of risk?” Embedded in that is “How do you evaluate the appropriateness of a security measure?” That is, all security has a cost. That cost has to be commensurate with the potential risk and...with the likelihood of the risk."
"And I really wanted to write a book that talks about these abstruse technical subjects: understanding and calculating risk. Unless you’re an insurance actuary, we tend to have no practical experience with [this]—at least not on a mathematical level."
"If people were smart about risk then casinos would be very small and shabby because everyone gambling would clean up and the owners would go broke."
"I think that Orwell existed in an era in which technology had not yet gotten to the most important part of its life cycle: the part at which it becomes not just a tool for people who have power, but also a tool for people who lack it. It’s not that people who lack power get technology and people who have power lose technology. Instead, what you get is a great balancing of the playing field. The people who have power have a lot of power, but they also rely on a fairly fragile technical infrastructure to sustain themselves. People who lack power don’t have much power, but what they do have is access to the same technologies and all they need to do to upset the status quo is f ind one failure—one weak point in a technology—to disrupt it..So technology advantages people who disrupt the status quo. So technology is part of the power imbalance, but it is also instrumental in overcoming the power imbalance."
"Once we went from typewriters to photocopiers and fax machines and tape decks, glasnost and samizdat were irretrievably underway. And that was really driven by this imbalance in technology."
"I think that astute people know that people who have a public life don’t disclose everything about themselves in their public life. Someone asked me a variant on this question a little while ago and I thought about it for the first time. I have a real kind of silly side...So I don’t tend to do a lot of that whimsical stuff in public forums. But it informs what I do. I think all public people, and I’m no exception, have facets of their personalities and their lives that they don’t expose to the public. And the whole picture of someone is always a lot more than just their public persona."
NOTES
Doyle, Genevieve, Henry Johnston, and Cory Doctorow. "Review of Cory Doctorow's Little Brother" Surveillance & Society [Online], 7 6 Jul 2010. Web. 3 May 2011.
via Google Scholar: "Since this special issue interrogates the role of surveillance in childhood, we thought it was important to hear from some young people. We asked Genevieve Doyle and Henry Johnston, two Canadian teenagers, to review Little Brother, a science fiction novel that tells the story of how seventeen-year-old Marcus, a.k.a “w1n5t0n” uses his hacking skills to challenge anti-terrorism surveillance. Genevieve and Henry decided to write their review as an email conversation. The novel’s author, Cory Doctorow, kindly agreed to read their comments, and suggest ways to carry on the conversation."
"...So I think a main theme of this book was bravery. Whether it’s standing up to his
parents, protecting his girlfriend or taking down the government, Marcus is always being brave. I really liked this aspect of the book. And overall I really enjoyed it, though it has got me really thinking. Do you think the government could be reading these e-mails right now?
Gen :) "
Cory Doctorow: "I thought I would add a little more information on the idea of laptop spying in schools. The Merion County High example – where administrators secretly installed covert webcam software that could be used to activate students’ cameras without any indication that they were being spied upon – is very much in the news, and rightly so. Merion County students were required to use these laptops, forbidden from bringing other laptops to school, and any attempt to modify the laptop (say, to disable spyware) was an expulsion offence.
But Merion County is just a more extreme example of the widespread use of spying technology in schools and workplaces. For example, a widely praised program that gave laptops to kids in a poor inner-city school in the Bronx, New York, involved installing webcam spying software, browsing spying software, email spying software, IM spying software, and other surveillance technologies on students’ “free” laptops (if that’s freedom, what must slavery look like?)."
"One spyware company that sells its software to parents who want to stop their kids from looking at naughty stuff was caught taking logs of kids’ emails and IMs
and selling them to market-research firms."
"Educators, parents and employers argue that they have a duty to make sure that the people who use their networks are “safe.” But having your privacy violated is itself unsafe. Being spied upon makes it hard to think creatively (a good teacher won’t sit on your shoulder watching you complete an assignment), to take intellectual risks, or to simply find the private space needed to think things through and solve your problems or have a breakthrough."
"In the case of the spyware used in Merion County, the webcam software was poorly designed, and security analysts have already identified ways in which it can be remotely exploited by unauthorized people. You just can’t make a computer safer by designing it to haveexceptions to its security policy."
Grossman, Austin. "Nerd Activists." New York Times Book Review (2008): 17. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 3 May 2011.
"An entertaining thriller and a thoughtful polemic on Internet-era civil rights, ''Little Brother'' is also a practical handbook of digital self-defense. Marcus's guided tour through RFID cloners, cryptography and Bayesian math is one of the book's principal delights. He spreads his message through a secure network engineered out of Xbox gaming consoles, to a tech-savvy youth underground (we are now post-nerd, I learned -- hipsters and social networking experts have replaced the unwashed coders of yore)."
"''Little Brother'' isn't shy about its intent to disseminate subversive ideas to a young audience. The novel comes with two essays, plus a bibliography of techno-countercultural writings, from ''On the Road'' to Bruce Schneier's ''Applied Cryptography.'' It's even been made available for a free download, a daring gesture that hasn't hurt its print sales in the least."
"''Little Brother'' argues that unless you're passably technically literate, you're not fully in command of those constitutionally guaranteed freedoms -- that in fact it's your patriotic duty as an American to be a little more nerdy."
NOTES Bernick, Philip. "Little Brother." Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 53.5 (2010): 433-4. Article Citation. Web. 3 May 2011.
" Little Brother mixes Orwellian paranoia with the raw explosive power of teen life, making wry and occasionally disturbing connections between fast Internet connections, suburban angst, pop culture, and state secrets. The mixology brings Doctorow's book into the realm of technology primer as well as thought-provoking read."
" Whether you have Orwellian sensibilities, wish you understood technology (or teenagers) better, are curious about hackers, seek adventure, enjoy videogames, root for underdogs, or question authority, Little Brother is a book you should read. "
" What are the effects of our choices? Is what we do the right thing even if it looks wrong to others? How would someone make do in a crisis? These questions come up repeatedly."
" Our family read Little Brother together, and afterward we had so many questions that we sought out the author, Doctorow, to get the answers. He generously agreed, and what followed was an enlightening 45-minute conversation about everything from the mechanics of writing compelling stories to the historical contexts and fiction-related inspirations for Little Brother."
"If we are not allowed to have all the information, how would we make educated decisions in our lives or influence others to make educated decisions? How can democracy, which is a form of government where all people are heard, work if all the people cannot express themselves and talk to one another to make informed choices? These are questions we want you to consider as you read this brochure."
"Sometimes, even today, the government will try to reduce our freedoms, and so a citizen or a group ofcitizens must remind the government officials that our freedoms are protected by the Bill of Rights."
Baileys, Alison. "Analytical Hypertext Essay: Little Brother." Website for English 138, Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA. Winter 2011. Web. 18 Jun. 2011. <http://webpages.scu.edu/ftp/abaileys/Little_Brother_Essay.html>
"...in his “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century”. Jenkins writes, “A participatory culture is a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression, and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one's creations, and…one in which members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one another” (Jenkins 3)”. ...Learning through means of a participatory network means the opportunity to develop essential skills that education in schools cannot teach. ... Collaboration is an essential aspect of participation in a networked culture; the freedom to collaborate is ultimately what forms networks and interconnected communities."
" Feeling that his rights to freedom of creation were in question, Marcus responded by increasing his participation in the networked culture in order to spread his own word and opinions regarding the government’s attempt to reduce participation. Through increasing his active role in the public sphere, Marcus developed a resistance to the infringement on society’s democratic rights. Although his involvement in the initial terrorist attack was only that he was in the vicinity of where it happened, the DHS continued to track Marcus and follow his every networked move. His ability to participate in the Internet culture allowed him the opportunity to respond to the threat on his freedom with a community of fellow participators behind him."
"John Perry Barlow, in his “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”, discusses the right to freely express yourself through an internet culture. Barlow writes, “Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product…In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost” (Barlow). Barlow acknowledges that the government does not have the right to infringe on the right to participate in the Internet, because it is composed of virtual society that depends on the freedom of expression."
opens with:
"Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather."
"You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat."
"Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish."
"We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before."
"...published online February 8, 1996 from Davos, Switzerland. It was written primarily in response to the passing into law of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 in the United States."
"Because of its subject matter, Barlow's work quickly became famous and well-distributed on the Internet. Within three months, an estimated 5,000 websites had copies of the Declaration.[4] At nine months, that number was estimated to be 40,000.[5]"
"Outside the Internet, the response was less positive. Larry Irving, the assistant secretary of commerce, said that a lack of safeguards would "slow down the growth of what is likely to be a major boon for consumers and business".[4] In the online magazine HotWired, one columnist referred to his document as simply "hogwash"."
"By 2002, the number of sites copying the Declaration was estimated to have dropped to 20,000.[7] In 2004, Barlow reflected on his 1990s work, specifically regarding his optimism. His response was "We all get older and smarter."[8]
Several very similar documents on the internet seem to precede the Declaration. Although Barlow does not dispute that his own manifesto borrowed, both conceptually and stylistically, from other documents, he strongly denies direct plagiarism. Such details remain in dispute between Barlow and the other contributors. What documents were borrowed from, and to what extent, remains unknown, but to date, no such authors have accused Barlow of anything unethical."
" Information is not a thing. It isn't an object. It isn't something that, when you sell it or have it stolen, ceases to remain in your possession. It doesn't have a market value that can be objectively determined. It is not, for example, much like a 2004 Ducati ST4S motorcycle, for which I'm presently in the market, and which seems - despite variabilities based on, I must admit, informationally- based conditions like mileage and whether it's been dropped - to have a value that is pretty consistent among the specimens I can find for a sale on the Web.
"
" It's this simple: the new meaning of the word "content," is plain wrong. In fact, it is intentionally wrong. It's a usage that only arose when the institutions that had fattened on their ability to bottle and distribute the genius of human expression began to realize that their containers were melting away, along with their reason to be in business. They started calling it content at exactly the time it ceased to be. Previously they had sold books and records and films, all nouns to be sure. They didn't know what to call the mysterious ghosts of thought that were attached to them.
Thus, when not applied to something you can put in a bucket (of whatever size), "content" actually represents a plot to make you think that meaning is a thing. It isn't. The only reason they want you to think that it is because they know how to own things, how to give them a value based on weight or quantity, and, more to the point, how to make them artificially scarce in order to increase their value."
" This is particularly true in America, where some combination of certainty and control is the actual "deity" before whose altar we worship, and where we have a regular practice of spawning large and inhuman collective organisms that are a kind of meta-parasite. These critters - let's call them publicly-held corporations - may be made out of humans, but they are not human. Given human folly, that characteristic might be semi-ok if they were actually as cold-bloodedly expedient as I once fancied them - yielding only to the will of the markets and the raw self-interest of their shareholders. But no. They are also symbiotically subject to the "religious beliefs" of those humans who feed in their upper elevations.
Unfortunately, the guys (and they mostly are guys) who've been running The Content Industry since it started to die share something like a doctrinal fundamentalism that has led them to such beliefs as the conviction that there's no difference between listening to a song and shop-lifting a toaster.
Moreover, they dwell in such a sublime state of denial that they think they are stewarding the creative process as it arises in the creative humans they exploit savagely - knowing, as they do, that a creative human would rather be heard than paid - and that they, a bunch of sated old scoundrels nearing retirement would be able to find technological means for wrapping "containers" around "their" "content" that the adolescent electronic Hezbollah they've inspired by suing their own customers will neither be smart nor motivated enough to shred whatever pathetic digital bottles their lackeys design.
" The thinking is simple: an information economy must be based on buying and selling information. Therefore, we need policies to make it harder to get access to information unless you've paid for it. That means that we have to make it harder for you to share information, even after you've paid for it. Without the ability to fence off your information property, you can't have an information market to fuel the information economy."
" Better access to more information is the hallmark of the information economy. The more IT we have, the more skill we have, the faster our networks get and the better our search tools get, the more economic activity the information economy generates. Many of us sell information in the information economy — I sell my printed books by giving away electronic books, lawyers and architects and consultants are in the information business and they drum up trade with Google ads, and Google is nothing but an info-broker — but none of us rely on curtailing access to information. Like a bottled water company, we compete with free by supplying a superior service, not by eliminating the competition.
The world's governments might have bought into the old myth of the information economy, but not so much that they're willing to ban the PC and the Internet."
"London-based blogger, science-fiction author, and digital-rights champion Cory Doctorow opened Day 2 of the Conference on Privacy and Youth via Skype. "
"Because librarians speak “with enormous moral authority,” Doctorow sees the profession as “perfectly positioned” to build a body of knowledge about the inefficacy of censorware and uncover through FOIA requests how some surveillance firms commoditize the data they amass. Then, he recommended, present the findings to local governing authorities and get them to spend the money on education and library collections instead. As for teaching young people how to use Facebook responsibly, Doctorow dismissed the idea, characterizing the social network as “terrible, and I don’t use it,” and recommending that the library community instead press for social networking platforms whose default settings are pseudonymity and anonymity. “We can create really powerful social contracts that are more powerful than technology,” he asserted."
"Speaking to ALA’s Privacy and Youth Conference from London via Skype, Cory Doctorow offered attendees a thought-provoking assessment of the privacy landscape for young people today. His “radical proposition” that libraries become islands of networked privacy best practices — places where young people are educated and empowered to take charge of their digital lives — provided provocative fodder for conference participants’ discussions. Do libraries have a role to play in educating youth about the privacy violations they face at our own institutions? In their own homes? Should we be teaching kids to jailbreak? How can we document the problems and inefficacy of internet filtering technologies, which so often stifle young people’s intellectual freedom and compromise their privacy?"
"The single most pernicious threat to liberty today is humanity's natural tendency to misunderstand the statistics of rare events. We're just not wired to have good intuition about things that happen with extreme infrequency."
"This is the same calculus that allows the fear of terrorism to take away our liberty: the statistically super-rare terrorist attacks present, on average, a much lower risk to our health, safety and person than, say, depriving us of our liquid medications, or of requiring us to leave our bags unlocked in flight so that sticky-fingered handlers can make off with our laptops and financial data and valuables."
"You don't get to understand the statistics of rare events by intuition. It's something that has to be learned, through formal and informal instruction. If there's one thing the government and our educational institutions could do to keep us safer, it's this: teach us how statistics works. They should drill it into us with the same vigor with which they approached convincing us that property values would rise forever, make it the subject of reality TV shows and infuse every corner of our news and politics with it. Without an adequate grasp of these concepts, no one can ever tell for sure if he or she is safe."
"Today’s kids are the most surveilled, most controlled generation in the history of the world. There’s no public space left for kids to play in unregarded, and every place they find that can be theirs is shut down or demonized as a pedophile’s dream come true --- this despite the minuscule, infinitesimal proportion of attacks on children that come from strangers they meet on the Internet."
"Q: What message, if any, do you want people to take away from LITTLE BROTHER?
CD: The most important message is the one that Benjamin Franklin gave to us in the eighteenth century: “Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” The freedom to be left alone; to open, understand, and improve your tools; to organize; to socialize --- these freedoms are all under unprecedented assault today, all over the world. The next generation of kids could grow up thinking that this is normal. That would be the worst disaster of all."
"All this data makes bigger haystacks in which it becomes harder and harder to identify the needles --- the real terrorist threats. Remember, the FBI had everything they needed to bust the 9/11 hijackers weeks before the planes went down, but they didn’t know it because the useful information was buried under mountains of useless stuff. The useless mountains are growing --- and so is the chance that you’ll be mistakenly identified as a terrorist and lose your freedom in large or small ways."
Doctorow, Cory. Little Brother. Cory Doctorow's Craphound.com. Web. 3 May 2011.
Purpose
The book, Little Brother by Cory Doctorow presents several challenging ideas related to security and privacy in a post-9/11 world that thrives on technological development. Your essay will demonstrate how well you articulate and support your own position of the issues related to intellectual freedom that Doctorow presents.
Task
After reading Little Brother, answer each of the questions below in a 5-8 page, double-spaced, essay:
Due 6/21
My Essay:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vzamhxfBkVdPfw9gQqyjBi00mrGPjOLEk4Fl5IG3AJc/edit?hl=en_US
see:
http://craphound.com/?p=3506
Teaching Guide
Public Reaction and Pop Culture
Steal this Wiki: inspired by Abbie Hoffman's Steal This Book that the main character uses, actually exists as a open source project that predates the novel : http://wiki.stealthiswiki.org/wiki/Main_Page
Facebook Fan Page: http://www.facebook.com/littlebrotherbook?sk=info
YouTube Playlist re: related videos: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=970BC5E23CB4B898
Limited Edition's Illustrations: http://www.flickr.com/photos/richard_wilkinson/sets/72157615716013042/
Remixes blessed by Doctorow per Creative Common Licensing of ebook: http://craphound.com/littlebrother/category/remixes/
Also by Cory Doctorow
His website bio (Toronto-born): http://craphound.com/bio.php
Audio Interview with Doctorow: http://www.sfbrp.com/archives/71
Videos Featuring Doctorow/Little Brother: http://www.facebook.com/littlebrotherbook?sk=app_57675755167
Security Literacy: teaching kids to think critically about security By Cory Doctorow: http://us.macmillan.com/BookCustomPage.aspx?isbn=9780765319852&m_type=4&m_contentid=6475
Professional Journal Reviews and Articles
Reviews
Bernick, Philip. "Little Brother." Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 53.5 (2010): 433-4. Article Citation. Web. 3 May 2011.Grossman, Austin. "Nerd Activists." New York Times Book Review (2008): 17. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 3 May 2011.
"Little Brother." Kirkus Reviews 76.7 (2008): 355. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 3 May 2011.
Articles
Bernick, Philip, Rhonda Steele, and Galen Bernick. "Interview With Cory Doctorow About Little Brother." Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 53.5 (2010): 434-439. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 3 May 2011.Doyle, Genevieve, Henry Johnston, and Cory Doctorow. "Review of Cory Doctorow's Little Brother" Surveillance & Society [Online], 7 6 Jul 2010. Web. 3 May 2011.
NOTES
Bernick, Philip, Rhonda Steele, and Galen Bernick. "Interview With Cory Doctorow About Little Brother." Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 53.5 (2010): 434-439. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 3 May 2011.
"In some sense, [Little Brother] is kind of an old-fashioned book because it assumes that the reader would love to have explicit information about some of the secret stuff going on that explains how the world works and how we got to where we are. You can’t find this out just by interrogating reality. You can’t f \ind it out by just looking really hard at stuff. You have to know some basic stuff to even know which questions to ask Google to f ind out more. Things like, “Why is it you can buy stuff from Amazon without getting ripped off?” or “What does that little key at the bottom of your browser mean?” or “What does it mean if the NSA wiretaps the entire country? How does all this stuff work?” And most importantly, “What is the probability of risk and how do you gauge the probability of risk?” Embedded in that is “How do you evaluate the appropriateness of a security measure?” That is, all security has a cost. That cost has to be commensurate with the potential risk and...with the likelihood of the risk."
"And I really wanted to write a book that talks about these abstruse technical subjects: understanding and calculating risk. Unless you’re an insurance actuary, we tend to have no practical experience with [this]—at least not on a mathematical level."
"If people were smart about risk then casinos would be very small and shabby because everyone gambling would clean up and the owners would go broke."
"I think that Orwell existed in an era in which technology had not yet gotten to the most important part of its life cycle: the part at which it becomes not just a tool for people who have power, but also a tool for people who lack it. It’s not that people who lack power get technology and people who have power lose technology. Instead, what you get is a great balancing of the playing field. The people who have power have a lot of power, but they also rely on a fairly fragile technical infrastructure to sustain themselves. People who lack power don’t have much power, but what they do have is access to the same technologies and all they need to do to upset the status quo is f ind one failure—one weak point in a technology—to disrupt it..So technology advantages people who disrupt the status quo. So technology is part of the power imbalance, but it is also instrumental in overcoming the power imbalance."
"Once we went from typewriters to photocopiers and fax machines and tape decks, glasnost and samizdat were irretrievably underway. And that was really driven by this imbalance in technology."
"I think that astute people know that people who have a public life don’t disclose everything about themselves in their public life. Someone asked me a variant on this question a little while ago and I thought about it for the first time. I have a real kind of silly side...So I don’t tend to do a lot of that whimsical stuff in public forums. But it informs what I do. I think all public people, and I’m no exception, have facets of their personalities and their lives that they don’t expose to the public. And the whole picture of someone is always a lot more than just their public persona."
NOTES
Doyle, Genevieve, Henry Johnston, and Cory Doctorow. "Review of Cory Doctorow's Little Brother" Surveillance & Society [Online], 7 6 Jul 2010. Web. 3 May 2011.
via Google Scholar: "Since this special issue interrogates the role of surveillance in childhood, we thought it was important to hear from some young people. We asked Genevieve Doyle and Henry Johnston, two Canadian teenagers, to review Little Brother, a science fiction novel that tells the story of how seventeen-year-old Marcus, a.k.a “w1n5t0n” uses his hacking skills to challenge anti-terrorism surveillance. Genevieve and Henry decided to write their review as an email conversation. The novel’s author, Cory Doctorow, kindly agreed to read their comments, and suggest ways to carry on the conversation."
"...So I think a main theme of this book was bravery. Whether it’s standing up to his
parents, protecting his girlfriend or taking down the government, Marcus is always being brave. I really liked this aspect of the book. And overall I really enjoyed it, though it has got me really thinking. Do you think the government could be reading these e-mails right now?
Gen :) "
Cory Doctorow: "I thought I would add a little more information on the idea of laptop spying in schools. The Merion County High example – where administrators secretly installed covert webcam software that could be used to activate students’ cameras without any indication that they were being spied upon – is very much in the news, and rightly so. Merion County students were required to use these laptops, forbidden from bringing other laptops to school, and any attempt to modify the laptop (say, to disable spyware) was an expulsion offence.
But Merion County is just a more extreme example of the widespread use of spying technology in schools and workplaces. For example, a widely praised program that gave laptops to kids in a poor inner-city school in the Bronx, New York, involved installing webcam spying software, browsing spying software, email spying software, IM spying software, and other surveillance technologies on students’ “free” laptops (if that’s freedom, what must slavery look like?)."
"One spyware company that sells its software to parents who want to stop their kids from looking at naughty stuff was caught taking logs of kids’ emails and IMs
and selling them to market-research firms."
"Educators, parents and employers argue that they have a duty to make sure that the people who use their networks are “safe.” But having your privacy violated is itself unsafe. Being spied upon makes it hard to think creatively (a good teacher won’t sit on your shoulder watching you complete an assignment), to take intellectual risks, or to simply find the private space needed to think things through and solve your problems or have a breakthrough."
"In the case of the spyware used in Merion County, the webcam software was poorly designed, and security analysts have already identified ways in which it can be remotely exploited by unauthorized people. You just can’t make a computer safer by designing it to haveexceptions to its security policy."
NOTES
"Cory Doctorow on Kids and the Impact of Technology (TVOParents Interview)". TVOntario. 23 Oct. 2009. Web. 17 Jun. 2011 <http://www.tvo.org/TVO/WebObjects/TVO.woa?videoid?53717524001>
(hand-written notes taken)
NOTES
Grossman, Austin. "Nerd Activists." New York Times Book Review (2008): 17. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 3 May 2011.
"An entertaining thriller and a thoughtful polemic on Internet-era civil rights, ''Little Brother'' is also a practical handbook of digital self-defense. Marcus's guided tour through RFID cloners, cryptography and Bayesian math is one of the book's principal delights. He spreads his message through a secure network engineered out of Xbox gaming consoles, to a tech-savvy youth underground (we are now post-nerd, I learned -- hipsters and social networking experts have replaced the unwashed coders of yore)."
"''Little Brother'' isn't shy about its intent to disseminate subversive ideas to a young audience. The novel comes with two essays, plus a bibliography of techno-countercultural writings, from ''On the Road'' to Bruce Schneier's ''Applied Cryptography.'' It's even been made available for a free download, a daring gesture that hasn't hurt its print sales in the least."
"''Little Brother'' argues that unless you're passably technically literate, you're not fully in command of those constitutionally guaranteed freedoms -- that in fact it's your patriotic duty as an American to be a little more nerdy."
NOTES
Bernick, Philip. "Little Brother." Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 53.5 (2010): 433-4. Article Citation. Web. 3 May 2011.
" Little Brother mixes Orwellian paranoia with the raw explosive power of teen life, making wry and occasionally disturbing connections between fast Internet connections, suburban angst, pop culture, and state secrets. The mixology brings Doctorow's book into the realm of technology primer as well as thought-provoking read."
" Whether you have Orwellian sensibilities, wish you understood technology (or teenagers) better, are curious about hackers, seek adventure, enjoy videogames, root for underdogs, or question authority, Little Brother is a book you should read. "
" What are the effects of our choices? Is what we do the right thing even if it looks wrong to others? How would someone make do in a crisis? These questions come up repeatedly."
" Our family read Little Brother together, and afterward we had so many questions that we sought out the author, Doctorow, to get the answers. He generously agreed, and what followed was an enlightening 45-minute conversation about everything from the mechanics of writing compelling stories to the historical contexts and fiction-related inspirations for Little Brother."
NOTES
O’Brien, Amanda O’Brien. "Kids, Know Your Rights! A Young Person's Guide to Intellectual Freedom (Brochure)." Intellectual Freedom Committee 2005-2007, Association for Library Service to Children: A Division of the American Library Association. 2007. Web. 12 May 2011. <http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/alsc/issuesadv/intellectualfreedom/kidsknowyourrights.pdf>
"If we are not allowed to have all the information, how would we make educated decisions in our lives or influence others to make educated decisions? How can democracy, which is a form of government where all people are heard, work if all the people cannot express themselves and talk to one another to make informed choices? These are questions we want you to consider as you read this brochure."
"Sometimes, even today, the government will try to reduce our freedoms, and so a citizen or a group ofcitizens must remind the government officials that our freedoms are protected by the Bill of Rights."
Baileys, Alison. "Analytical Hypertext Essay: Little Brother." Website for English 138, Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA. Winter 2011. Web. 18 Jun. 2011. <http://webpages.scu.edu/ftp/abaileys/Little_Brother_Essay.html>
"...in his “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century”. Jenkins writes, “A participatory culture is a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression, and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one's creations, and…one in which members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one another” (Jenkins 3)”. ...Learning through means of a participatory network means the opportunity to develop essential skills that education in schools cannot teach. ... Collaboration is an essential aspect of participation in a networked culture; the freedom to collaborate is ultimately what forms networks and interconnected communities."
" Feeling that his rights to freedom of creation were in question, Marcus responded by increasing his participation in the networked culture in order to spread his own word and opinions regarding the government’s attempt to reduce participation. Through increasing his active role in the public sphere, Marcus developed a resistance to the infringement on society’s democratic rights. Although his involvement in the initial terrorist attack was only that he was in the vicinity of where it happened, the DHS continued to track Marcus and follow his every networked move. His ability to participate in the Internet culture allowed him the opportunity to respond to the threat on his freedom with a community of fellow participators behind him."
"John Perry Barlow, in his “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”, discusses the right to freely express yourself through an internet culture. Barlow writes, “Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product…In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost” (Barlow). Barlow acknowledges that the government does not have the right to infringe on the right to participate in the Internet, because it is composed of virtual society that depends on the freedom of expression."
NOTES
Barlow, John Perry. "Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace." Electronic Frontier Foundation. 8 Feb. 1996. Web. 18 Jun. 2011. <https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html>
opens with:
"Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather."
"You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat."
"Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish."
"We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before."
NOTES
"A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. Web. 18 Jun. 2011. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Declaration_of_the_Independence_of_Cyberspace>
"...John Perry Barlow, a founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation,"
"...published online February 8, 1996 from Davos, Switzerland. It was written primarily in response to the passing into law of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 in the United States."
"Because of its subject matter, Barlow's work quickly became famous and well-distributed on the Internet. Within three months, an estimated 5,000 websites had copies of the Declaration.[4] At nine months, that number was estimated to be 40,000.[5]"
"Outside the Internet, the response was less positive. Larry Irving, the assistant secretary of commerce, said that a lack of safeguards would "slow down the growth of what is likely to be a major boon for consumers and business".[4] In the online magazine HotWired, one columnist referred to his document as simply "hogwash"."
"By 2002, the number of sites copying the Declaration was estimated to have dropped to 20,000.[7] In 2004, Barlow reflected on his 1990s work, specifically regarding his optimism. His response was "We all get older and smarter."[8]
Several very similar documents on the internet seem to precede the Declaration. Although Barlow does not dispute that his own manifesto borrowed, both conceptually and stylistically, from other documents, he strongly denies direct plagiarism. Such details remain in dispute between Barlow and the other contributors. What documents were borrowed from, and to what extent, remains unknown, but to date, no such authors have accused Barlow of anything unethical."
NOTES
Barlow, John Perry. "Introduction by John Perry Barlow." ©ontent Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future. By Cory Doctorow. San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2008. Web. <http://www.cosmic-kitchen.com/c-books.php?id=Doctorow,_Cory2008Content&chap=_intro_05>
" Information is not a thing. It isn't an object. It isn't something that, when you sell it or have it stolen, ceases to remain in your possession. It doesn't have a market value that can be objectively determined. It is not, for example, much like a 2004 Ducati ST4S motorcycle, for which I'm presently in the market, and which seems - despite variabilities based on, I must admit, informationally- based conditions like mileage and whether it's been dropped - to have a value that is pretty consistent among the specimens I can find for a sale on the Web.
"
" It's this simple: the new meaning of the word "content," is plain wrong. In fact, it is intentionally wrong. It's a usage that only arose when the institutions that had fattened on their ability to bottle and distribute the genius of human expression began to realize that their containers were melting away, along with their reason to be in business. They started calling it content at exactly the time it ceased to be. Previously they had sold books and records and films, all nouns to be sure. They didn't know what to call the mysterious ghosts of thought that were attached to them.
Thus, when not applied to something you can put in a bucket (of whatever size), "content" actually represents a plot to make you think that meaning is a thing. It isn't. The only reason they want you to think that it is because they know how to own things, how to give them a value based on weight or quantity, and, more to the point, how to make them artificially scarce in order to increase their value."
" This is particularly true in America, where some combination of certainty and control is the actual "deity" before whose altar we worship, and where we have a regular practice of spawning large and inhuman collective organisms that are a kind of meta-parasite. These critters - let's call them publicly-held corporations - may be made out of humans, but they are not human. Given human folly, that characteristic might be semi-ok if they were actually as cold-bloodedly expedient as I once fancied them - yielding only to the will of the markets and the raw self-interest of their shareholders. But no. They are also symbiotically subject to the "religious beliefs" of those humans who feed in their upper elevations.
Unfortunately, the guys (and they mostly are guys) who've been running The Content Industry since it started to die share something like a doctrinal fundamentalism that has led them to such beliefs as the conviction that there's no difference between listening to a song and shop-lifting a toaster.
Moreover, they dwell in such a sublime state of denial that they think they are stewarding the creative process as it arises in the creative humans they exploit savagely - knowing, as they do, that a creative human would rather be heard than paid - and that they, a bunch of sated old scoundrels nearing retirement would be able to find technological means for wrapping "containers" around "their" "content" that the adolescent electronic Hezbollah they've inspired by suing their own customers will neither be smart nor motivated enough to shred whatever pathetic digital bottles their lackeys design.
And so it has been for the last 13 years."
NOTES
Doctorow, Cory. "It's the Information Economy, Stupid." ©ontent Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future. San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2008. Web.
<http://www.cosmic-kitchen.com/c-books.php?id=Doctorow,_Cory2008Content&chap=chap_07>
" The thinking is simple: an information economy must be based on buying and selling information. Therefore, we need policies to make it harder to get access to information unless you've paid for it. That means that we have to make it harder for you to share information, even after you've paid for it. Without the ability to fence off your information property, you can't have an information market to fuel the information economy."
" Better access to more information is the hallmark of the information economy. The more IT we have, the more skill we have, the faster our networks get and the better our search tools get, the more economic activity the information economy generates. Many of us sell information in the information economy — I sell my printed books by giving away electronic books, lawyers and architects and consultants are in the information business and they drum up trade with Google ads, and Google is nothing but an info-broker — but none of us rely on curtailing access to information. Like a bottled water company, we compete with free by supplying a superior service, not by eliminating the competition.
The world's governments might have bought into the old myth of the information economy, but not so much that they're willing to ban the PC and the Internet."
NOTES
Goldberg, Beverly. "Conference on Privacy and Youth: Day 2." Inside Scoop-News and Views from Inside AL (Blog of American Libraries: The Magazine of the American Library Association). 25 Mar. 2011. Web. 17 Jun. 2011. <http://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/inside-scoop/conference-privacy-and-youth-day-2>
"London-based blogger, science-fiction author, and digital-rights champion Cory Doctorow opened Day 2 of the Conference on Privacy and Youth via Skype. "
"Because librarians speak “with enormous moral authority,” Doctorow sees the profession as “perfectly positioned” to build a body of knowledge about the inefficacy of censorware and uncover through FOIA requests how some surveillance firms commoditize the data they amass. Then, he recommended, present the findings to local governing authorities and get them to spend the money on education and library collections instead. As for teaching young people how to use Facebook responsibly, Doctorow dismissed the idea, characterizing the social network as “terrible, and I don’t use it,” and recommending that the library community instead press for social networking platforms whose default settings are pseudonymity and anonymity. “We can create really powerful social contracts that are more powerful than technology,” he asserted."
NOTES
"Cory Doctorow's Radical Proposition for Libraries." Privacy and Youth: A Project of the American Library Association Office for Intellectual Freedom. 3 May 2011. Web. 17 Jun. 2011.
<http://youthprivacy.ala.org/2011/05/03/cory-doctorows-radical-proposition-for-libraries/>
"Speaking to ALA’s Privacy and Youth Conference from London via Skype, Cory Doctorow offered attendees a thought-provoking assessment of the privacy landscape for young people today. His “radical proposition” that libraries become islands of networked privacy best practices — places where young people are educated and empowered to take charge of their digital lives — provided provocative fodder for conference participants’ discussions. Do libraries have a role to play in educating youth about the privacy violations they face at our own institutions? In their own homes? Should we be teaching kids to jailbreak? How can we document the problems and inefficacy of internet filtering technologies, which so often stifle young people’s intellectual freedom and compromise their privacy?"
Doctorow, Cory. "The Odds are Stacked Against Us." 20 May 2008. guardian.co.uk. Web. 17 Jun. 2011. <http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/may/20/rare.events>
"The single most pernicious threat to liberty today is humanity's natural tendency to misunderstand the statistics of rare events. We're just not wired to have good intuition about things that happen with extreme infrequency."
"This is the same calculus that allows the fear of terrorism to take away our liberty: the statistically super-rare terrorist attacks present, on average, a much lower risk to our health, safety and person than, say, depriving us of our liquid medications, or of requiring us to leave our bags unlocked in flight so that sticky-fingered handlers can make off with our laptops and financial data and valuables."
"You don't get to understand the statistics of rare events by intuition. It's something that has to be learned, through formal and informal instruction. If there's one thing the government and our educational institutions could do to keep us safer, it's this: teach us how statistics works. They should drill it into us with the same vigor with which they approached convincing us that property values would rise forever, make it the subject of reality TV shows and infuse every corner of our news and politics with it. Without an adequate grasp of these concepts, no one can ever tell for sure if he or she is safe."
"Author Profile: Cory Doctorow." Teenreads.com. The Book Report, Inc., 2008. Web. 17 Jun. 2011. <http://www.teenreads.com/authors/au-doctorow-cory.asp>
"Today’s kids are the most surveilled, most controlled generation in the history of the world. There’s no public space left for kids to play in unregarded, and every place they find that can be theirs is shut down or demonized as a pedophile’s dream come true --- this despite the minuscule, infinitesimal proportion of attacks on children that come from strangers they meet on the Internet."
"Q: What message, if any, do you want people to take away from LITTLE BROTHER?
CD: The most important message is the one that Benjamin Franklin gave to us in the eighteenth century: “Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” The freedom to be left alone; to open, understand, and improve your tools; to organize; to socialize --- these freedoms are all under unprecedented assault today, all over the world. The next generation of kids could grow up thinking that this is normal. That would be the worst disaster of all."
"All this data makes bigger haystacks in which it becomes harder and harder to identify the needles --- the real terrorist threats. Remember, the FBI had everything they needed to bust the 9/11 hijackers weeks before the planes went down, but they didn’t know it because the useful information was buried under mountains of useless stuff. The useless mountains are growing --- and so is the chance that you’ll be mistakenly identified as a terrorist and lose your freedom in large or small ways."